In 1960, the Imperial War Museum began the important task of capturing the first-hand experiences of servicemen that fought during the Great War. A team of academics, archivists and volunteers set about tracing WWI veterans and interviewing them at length in order to record the experiences of ordinary individuals in war.
The IWM Voices of the First World War aural archive has thus become one of the most important archives of its kind in the world. There are a total of fifty episodes from servicemen and women in the British Army covering every aspect of the war, and we are fortunate that one of them is 524 Cpl FC Russell of the 22nd Battalion.
In 2026 I was delighted when John Austin, himself a descendant of a former 22nd Battalion soldier 5704 Dvr JW Austin, contacted me to say that in 1981 he had the privilege to interview 461 Sgt EC Smart. John has provided all sixteen tapes covering the entire period of the Great War from Sgt Smart’s early life in Melbourne, enlisting, training and serving in Gallipoli, Egypt, France and Belgium. It is our hope that the conversations with Ern Smart will also be added to the archive collections of either the IWM or AWM in Canberra
Following the Twenty-Second 